Searching the Past to Understand the Future

02/05/2013

The State of the Blog 2013

I tend to put up some sort of State of the Blog post every year. I usually do it in January, I think. I also usually put up a bunch of grandiose plans that there’s no fucking way I’ll ever be able to actually carry out.

In truth, the blog isn’t really an important focus of mine. Nobody pays me to do it. Not that many people read it. I just do it because I like writing and I don’t have a lot of outlets for writing these days.

So I don’t have a big State of the Blog this year. I have five plans, such as they are:

1. I’m going to do the After Tamerlane stuff. Because it’s cool.

2. I’d like to get back to the Byzantine Logic stuff. I realized the other day that I haven’t done a proper Byzantine Logic post since before the move from Blogspot to Typepad, which is kind of crazy.

3. 1434 Fridays. At least, I’d like to do 1434 Fridays at least three times a month.

4. I’ve had an idea kicking around that I call “sketches.” Basically, I get some interesting character sketches knocking about from time to time. They’re usually short, single scenes of interaction between two or three characters. I usually don’t have any intention of doing anything with the scene itself in a larger scheme. I believe, though, that writing fiction is an act of empathy and sometimes a writer simply has to practice that empathy. Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a whole series of novels. Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a single page.

5. I never finished A Distant, Dreadful Star. This, I fear, is inexcusable. Part of the problem is that I started writing it right before I bought the house. Part of the problem is that I started writing it because I had a beginning but had no end. It’s now sat dormant for nearly a year as far as writing is concerned. It hasn’t been dormant in my mind, however, and I know exactly where the story has to go.

As such, feel free to read the first ten installments of A Distant, Dreadful Star. The long lost (no, really, I wrote it back in March of 2012) 11th installment shall go up tomorrow. For some reason I thought it would work better as the 12th installment and I needed to write another, more differenter installment first. Looking back, I don’t think that’s the case. With any sort of luck there will be a new installment every Wednesday until I finish.

Also, and I say this with a certain level of amazement, I’m really excited about this. I was re-reading some bits that I haven’t looked at since I originally wrote them and there were several things that caused me to think, “Holy shit, I can actually write.” I know that writers are supposed to hate everything that they wrote in the past because they’re never supposed to be satisfied. I’ll admit that A Distant, Dreadful Star is far from perfect. I’ll also admit that there are some parts that say exactly what I want them to say in exactly the way I want them to do it.

2 Comments

Yep. My dad handed a printout of something I'd been writing a few years back. I know why I stopped - basically, I'd gone a good hundred and twenty pages, and only really covered the first two days of a story that was supposed to cover events across a good three weeks - but I was reading back through what I'd set up, and found myself thinking: Hey, this is pretty good!

It's nice to be pleasantly surprised. One of the interesting things about blogging is that I find it's a record of things that I can go back and say, "Hey, that was really funny," or, "Wow, that was exactly what I wanted it to be." It's also a record of things that fill me with shame for their lack of crsftsmanship or, y'know, a point.

I think the most interesting bits, though, are the ones where I can look at something and realize, "This was close, but a really clunky way to do that." That, I think, is where the real learning comes in. Several bits of A Distant, Dreadful Star did exactly that to me last night when I was re-reading it.

Also, it occurs to me that my decision to consider the sketches as valid blog fodder should be partially credited to you. Your little one-off stories convinced me it's possible. Mine probably won't involve monsters or the supernatural too often, though. I really like writing small, self-contained moments that specifically focus on interactions. If I go much beyond that I start writing novels that never end...